


Reaching in the Dark

by soulmuzik



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV), Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Big Sister Rachel, F/M, Gen, Minor Bonnie Bennett/Damon Salvatore, Minor Jacob Black/Bella Swan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-06-01 04:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15135125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulmuzik/pseuds/soulmuzik
Summary: The road to redemption isn't paved at all, it seems.Jacob x Bonnie, Road Trip AU





	Reaching in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> AN AU FOR YOU! I have always thought that Bonnie Bennett and Jacob Black had a lot in common. Here's to some emotional growth, followed by cuddles, *fingers crossed*.
> 
> Post s6-TVD  
> Post Eclipse (Movie)-Twilight
> 
> Disclaimer: None of it belongs to me.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is...mostly a draft (like all of my writing, lol) I love this pairing and I love the idea of redemption and I love Florence & the Machine and I love road-trip AUs. So here you go!
> 
> TVD: S6 cannon divergence  
> Twilight: somewhere before Bella gets married, after New Moon? (Movie-verse)
> 
> Summary: They're both running away. Somewhere along the way, they realized they were running together.

Jacob tries hard to forget. He’s not very good at it. He’s always been way too sentimental. Even now, making a withdrawal from an ATM outside of Seattle feels like he’s saying his final goodbyes and laying his old life in a casket. Dramatics aside, the sentiment stands. He’s not home. He’s not going back home. Maybe never again. So, he tries to forget.

 

He presses the buttons on an ATM machine and, when he isn’t prompted to press some more, puts his hands back in his pockets. The fine satin lining in the pocket of his father’s old leather jacket makes him think of home almost immediately. He left right before the Harvest Festival: he and Seth were supposed to emcee the talent show this year. He smiles at the memory of Seth rattling off the indecent references none of their parents would understand. The memory is good, but its hazy so it lacks the kind of impact that would make him stop what he was doing and go turn back. There are things he doesn’t want to forget, sure; like Seth, and Leah, and Quil and Embry and his dad.

 

There are also things he _has_ to forget.

 

Like Bella.

 

The bills slide from the machine in rapid succession. Jacob will count them when he gets back to his room. With both hands in his jacket pockets, and an old cap pulled down over his head, he makes his way towards the Motel Six. In room 12B, he’s got a suitcase with a couple weeks’ worth of clothes, his laptop, his old phone, and a one way ticket out of Washington.

|***|

_Rain comes down in sheets outside his window and Jacob stares without seeing it. Rachel’s voice is like a buzz above the rain; the two sounds war for his attention, but the rain is winning. It’s easier to listen to the rain, wallow in your heartache, than to listen to good, common sense from your big sister._

 

_“Jake? Jake, you listening?”_

 

_Her voice fades back in like music when your tuning a radio. He nods, even though she can’t see it, “Yeah, Rach, I’m listening.”_

 

_“No, you’re not”, she catches his lie, easily. It doesn’t matter that they’re on the phone, she still reads him, “but you need to. This whole Bella thing is…is a mess, Jay. A mess you don’t need to get caught up in. You’re barely out of high school and you’re talking about packs and vampires and being in love with this, frankly, inconsiderate bitch--“_

 

_“Hey”, Jacob’s voice is warning, harsher than he means it to be, “don’t.”_

 

_“Look, all I’m saying is…La Push and all that shit can get really heavy. Maybe too heavy. I just want you to know, that if you ever need a break, I’ve got an extra bedroom in my apartment.”_

 

_Jacob, while the gears turn in his head, laughs at his sister, “who’s paying you enough to have a two bedroom on a CNA salary?”_

 

_“So it’s a shitty apartment”, he can hear her smile and it makes him smile, for the first time in a long time, “but it’s comfortable. And there are no Cullens or Bella Swans or Pack in Chicago. There’s just me, a cat named Judas, and a room for you if you need to get away from everything.” She pauses. He thinks. “Seriously. I’ll call Dad. Come to Chicago. Take a break. Get away from everything.”_

 

 _Bella was what Rachel meant when she said_ everything _, Jacob knows that. He also knows that taking a break isnt a bad idea. Between Sam’s aggressive recruitment and Bella’s hot and cold tap dance on his heart, he hasn’t been doing to stellar in school. He knows that if he joins in with Sam, he won’t have to worry about school anymore, or a lot of other things. What if he’s not ready for that? It dawns on Jacob that Rachel left La Push and got a life; maybe could he do it, too._

 

_Jacob made his decision, “I’ll think about it, Rachel.”_

 

_“Don’t think too long little brother”, she sing-songs, “my roommate listing goes up on Craigslist in three weeks._

|***|

Jacob climbs the white, grated metal stairs of the two-layer motel. He looks at the chipping paint and is reminded of Leah Clearwater’s old truck.

 

He keeps his eyes up, looking for his room door.

 

Jacob has spent very little time from home. He’s gone on a few vacations, stayed at a resort or two, but he doesn’t remember the room décor being so monotone. He tries to ignore how the walls make everything orange as he strips off his jacket and pulls out the cash from his pockets to count.  

 

$200 total from his savings account.

 

 _$225_ for the greyhound ticket.

 

“Shit”, he sighs, pressing the bills into his wallet. He couldn’t call his father: he’d be waking up in a few hours to find that Jake had left, a move he certainly had not given his blessing for. He couldn’t call Rachel: she didn’t even know he was coming. He still had a week till she was putting up her posting, so, he intended to surprise her and deal with all the consequences later.

 

But here the consequences were, staring him in the face and reminding him of how quickly he forgets to think something through before he does it. Disappointment weighs his chest down like a stone, and he pushes against the way his mind comes up blank on options, “How the hell am I supposed to get outta here?”

 

And that’s when he hears her voice from the parking lot, like an answer to prayer.

~*~

“THIS STUPID FUCKING CAR”, Bonnie cannot, and does not, help the boom of her voice as the old muscle car behaves the way old cars do, and sputters, jerking forward as she hurriedly pulls it into the motel parking lot. She’d been driving for two hours, in _any_ direction out of Portland, and had always wanted to see the Seattle space needle. _Not like this_ , she thought, kicking her feet in an effort to direct her anger somewhere, _not with a broken car and a broken spirit_ . The laugh is bitter and audible, and she gets out of the car and _shows her ass_. She kicks the tires and beats her open palms against the roof of the car, slamming the door and hitting the hood. This solves nothing. This does not help. But Bonnie likes the force she uses to dent the hood and the way her hands curl into fists in her fury. It’s freeing in a way she has never been free.

 

She’d always been strong, demure, the suffer-in-silence type; but she’s found her voice, and she’ll never lose it again. There are no inhibitions for the dead.

 

Or the presumed dead, in her case.

 

Bonnie left everything behind in that Portland garage, including a very real looking illusion that will confirm the worst for all her friends and free her from the confines of the broken life that belonged to her in Mystic Falls.

 

She had a decision to make, back in that garage. She could die, or she could live. And if she was going to live, then she was really going to live; not go backwards. She had no more family. Her friends had been her undoing. For 20 years she’d lived as a shadow in her own damn life and she wasn’t going to do it anymore. She’d had enough. So she found herself at an impasse.

 

Die. Or live.

 

 _Live_ , she decided. And she’d pack up this old muscle car and wore those sunglasses and gone somewhere no one knew her name or expected anything from her. She was going to start over, on her own terms and with her own rules. But she wasn’t going anywhere without wheels.

 

Bonnie lifted the hood of the car, coughing at the way the smoke plumed around her head. She waited until it dissipated before raising a threatening foot to the front of the car when she heard a voice.

 

“Before you curb stomp your bumper”, she watches him lean, this pretty boy interrupting her fury, against the banister. His smirk is something she’s used to--charm that always seems to have teeth in the end, so she steels herself for a fight, “mind if I take a look?.”

 

“Can I help you?” Bonnie sneers, and it only deepens when his smile does. God, does she always have to attract assholes?

 

“I was hoping to help you, actually”, he says, with that disarming smile that would make her think of the sun, maybe, if she weren't so damn mad. At the car. At her life. At the world. Bonnie doesn't think she used to carry her baggage like this before; out in the open and without apology. She only remembers holding all of her pain close to her chest, but now, she doesn’t feel bound to. She used to do that for her friends--to save them from what felt insurmountable to her. To save them from what they may have not been able to handle. And all the while, she thought of them, and they thought of themselves.

 

But now, she’ll take a page out of good ol’ Damon’s book and _live out loud_.

 

“I didnt ask for it”, she tries to say with some element of cool. She may be mad, but she’s also a little better at social situations than Damon. She used to be, at least. All brawns over here is the first person she’s had longer than a polite exchange with since she left Portland and started seeing people again. She thought she’d be starving for it--run into the streets and greet everyone with a hug and a kiss for being alive. Instead, she saw a woman pumping gas beside her and wanted to crawl into her skin. She’d forgotten what it was like--being around people. And it frightened her, how inhuman she must be now.

 

So she drove, in silence. And fumed, about the injustices done to her in this short life she’s lived. And she let the anger take her and took it out on the car and this beautiful unlucky man was about to get all of it, if she wasn't careful. So she hung onto that smile, and his naivety, and tried to think of something other than survival.

 

“I was offering”, he smiles again, this time a little dimmer. She doesn’t expect him to deflate as quickly as he’s beginning to--men with smiles like that never do. She tries not to think of the ones she knows. “I’m...stuck too, I guess. And I figured if one of us could get out of here tonight, I’ve accomplished something”, he shrugs his shoulder and slides an easy smile back on.

 

Bonnie’s mind runs a mile a minute, because this stranger is offering her what no one else in her life ever has without prompting--help. Her brows furrow, all that rage roiling up in her insides quelling for a minute to study him. He looks so...young. And there’s something dark behind his eyes--something broken and familiar to Bonnie. It’s strange, the way they stand in this empty parking lot beside her smoking car unlikely in every way, but Bonnie doesn't need magic to see the sameness in them. Like he’s said; he’s stuck too. Maybe he’s running, too.

 

It’s been a long time since Bonnie hasn’t felt alone.

 

“Uh”, she looks between him and the smoke, and his grin becomes a smile that becomes a laugh.

 

“You don’t have to”, he says and she rolls her eyes because she knows that. But she thinks she wants to--because she could never really trust everyone else, after everything. But she could trust herself. And she could see herself, in this man.

 

“But I am”, she says, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips, “I’m Bonnie. Where are you going?”

 

“Jake--Jacob”, he corrects, the shadow of something crossing his face for a moment, as he collects himself with a laugh she pretends she doesnt recognize is a cover, “and far away. Chicago.”

 

Bonnie looks at him, looks at Jacob. And Jacob looks back. And Bonnie thinks that maybe she doesnt have to do this whole ‘finding herself’ thing, alone. It looks like he’s doing the same.

  
“Well, Jacob”, she slaps the hood of the car and they both grin a little at her continued violence against it, “if you can get this piece of _shit_ going...you want a ride?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! This was very experimental, as I've never actually watched TVD and I think I'm with the general populous on Twilight. Let me know what you think of the characters/story/etc. I'm very curious if this is a worthwhile thing to pursue. The characters are great and tragic and my jam, so...I'm curious! Reviews/dialogue appreciated!!

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! Let me know what you think in the comments! <3


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